Optimize your frontend performance with Magento

November 14, 2014 6:11:31 AM PSTBy Webinse team

There are several ways to optimize your website for customer. The first way is to make your website attractive. Here you should choose custom themes (both free and payed) that developed by Magento community and partners.

You know that impact conversion depends on the website frontend performance very much. We know that this should be perfect for your customers. According to latest statistics you should spend a lot of time on your website’s performance.

To optimize the performance of Magento, JavaScript and CSS files should be compressed and aggregated. There are modules that can help you do that. Image compression can be very useful, but always be careful – do not spend too much time on it – you can loose in image quality.

Sometimes we need to buy Magento themes and to customize them for a better frontend performance, be very careful when rewriting base code in Magento. If you use custom layouts for your theme, you should know the code, which is currently chaning or to know the ode of new layout. Make sure that database of Magento inquiries product attributes to provide optimal performance. Hacked or bad layouts with duplicate or unnecessary requests to Magento can be the main reason for slow loading of your webstore.

SQL queries can have a significant impact on the speed and time of page loading. Speed is very important for your fronend performance. Your customer don´t want to wait while your beautiful design will be loaded. For example, when someone goes to the product category, your website may have a list of 100 products on each page with its own specific product information. Time of loading negatively affects on how each of these elements pull requests to the database for information. Magento Data collection will optimize your requests to the database repository by loading several products in one package, which is much faster than to do it one by one.

While many modules available for Magento are made to improve shopping experience, sometimes these modules using coding best practices to fit properly to the rest of the code. This problem can adversely affect the frontend performance of your website and may require a lot of custom development to improve your frontend performance, which can be expensive and take a lot of time. It is important to review the code of the module in details before integrate it into the store to optimize the frontend performance of Magento.

To optimize your frontend performance in Magento:

Make sure you are using the latest version of PHP that is supported. Generally speaking, PHP becomes faster and better with each new release. But, like any other software, new versions may cause errors, incompatibility or fronted performance problems, so be sure to check the release notes and carefully check out the new versions.

Keep your database clean. Magento shops may become shallow over time due to accumulated database logs. The database logs should be regularly cleaned out. Magento and various modules´ observers store automatically created database logs to record sessions and interactions. If you are using an external tracking tool, for example, Google Analytics, you may not use Magento tracking as well. Disabling this activity will help you to reduce the load on your website.

Enable caching that is based on Magento. Heavy caching will help load your website faster, as it reduces the direct requests to the server for files that are rarely modified - JavaScript, CSS, images, or the themes and graphics.

Like tracking tools described above, turn off unused modules to reduce the amount of resources that is added to each page. Modules can be either turned off directly from the Magento admin panel or XML files to optimize the speed of frontend performance in Magento.